Postscript: today, on this very same street where misguided teenybopper singers marry and gangsters torch their enemies, the streets were lined with.....fancy dressing rooms, decorated catering trucks, gaffer lights and all manner of film equipment. Well, if it's not one thing, it's another!!

Thanks, Mad, that's what I needed to understand. I'm in zone 6 and it gets pretty darn cold but winter is our driest time of the year so I don't have that problem. Even the snow is dry as weird as that sounds. The thing that is worst for my roses is the fluctuating temperatures. It can be 40 in the daytime and below zero at night. Or we can go a week or ten days in the teens and then have a week in the 30s and 40s. The roses get confused, try to bud out, then freeze, then thaw, back and forth. I've found that they can only do that so many times before the stored energy in the roots and canes just gives out and they die. Mulching them insulates them from that yo-yoing effect to some degree. I look for a hard freeze to get them dormant and then winter protect to try and keep them dormant until I know the temps will stay warm enough for them to start growing. Yes, Natural, you can winter protect pots. I have 30 (it was as high as 60 last winter) in pots that I've been winter protecting for 6 winters now. If you have a garage, and with only two to protect, I'd say put them in the unheated garage for the winter. Put them up on pot trolleys or blocks off the cement floor (Michaelg thinks I'm nuts about that BTW, lol) and remember to give them a little water every month. It's doesn't have to be a lot but they're dormant, not dead, and need some water. Desiccation will kill a rose quick too. A lot of people I know who garage their pots will take a shovel full of snow when they shovel their driveway and put it on the pots to water them. I do that with the one and only rose that will fit inside my shed, the tree rose. It gets the prized spot because I can't winter protect that top graft in the pot ghetto. All the rest of my pots winter outside on the back, south facing, wall of my house. I group them all together, drive in wood stakes, surround the whole thing with burlap and then pack it with leaves. In 6 years I've lost way more roses in the ground than in the pot ghetto. And those were usually sickly going in. And don't do it too early. I don't do mine until after Thanksgiving usually. Like I said you want to make sure they're completely dormant and then keep them dormant until night time temps are consistently above freezing. So don't get itchy in the spring (a bad habit of mine) and pull them out too soon either. Hope all that helps and if you have any other questions, ask away! Through trial and error I've done most everything you can do wrong but eventually figured some things out, lol!

Don't think I will be following the recommendations of a California retired corrections officer, that got her business degree on line and now professes to have all this various, so called scientific knowledge. Sequoia54, like you, I have a serious problem with anyone that says "say no to vaccines" and that alone leaves the rest of the info posted to be extremely suspect. nhbabs, I like to see scientific documentation and testing as well and not just so called claims to various things with no links to verify the info other the the original person making the claims. I need documentation, scientific testing and proof first. "considering what the world is facing with the Japan disaster". If you are referring to the risks of nuclear power, then you are talking about reality. If you are talking about serious problems in obtaining various products that are manufactured in Japan, then you are talking about reality. If you are talking about radiation from the Japanese nuclear power plants traveling around the world and creating havoc around the world, well, Then you are talking absurdity that is more than just ridiculous. It's outright outlandish and not true. As has been already stated "caveat lector." otherwise known as "reader beware. Fran

Cleared the entire yard after a freeze wearing a bikini. It was a house we rented and I had no idea the yard was full of poison ivy. I missed a month of work and took steroids for 2 months. I had to sleep on the couch wrapped in towels because of all the fluid seeping out everywhere from my rash. Then I got poison ivy 2 BLOCKS from that house when the dog got tangled in weeds & I reached down to free him. I already had a rash and everywhere I scratched I got poison ivy-the resins were under my nails. Steroids for another 6 weeks and 3 weeks of missed work. We live 3 blocks from the house I used to rent. I don't go that way anymore! Luckily I don't own a weed eater or I'm sure I would use it to try and chop off body parts. I did sit in a mound of fire ants to pull weeds last summer, right after the poison ivy cleared. Got a great black eye from a branch that came back and hit me while I was trimming bushes. Pulled fireweed one day before work and had to call in because my hands were so swollen I couldn't type. And like PJ I look better AFTER the waterhose fight. I seem to attract mud to my body, I feel like pigpen when I garden. Cheap mudbath. Tally HO!